a picture speaks a thousand words.

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Hi I’m Enda McVeigh And I love photography.

I Enda McVeigh started collecting photos when I was seven. I was given a collection of old photographs from my grandparents, a dusty old shoe box, filled with a hundred memories. Each one a moment in time, captured, recorded, frozen. I was entranced, I would spend hours looking through them imagining who they were and what was happening in each image. All the acts and events that led up to that single moment in time. On occasion I would use the Photo as the beginning of my story. Give each person in the picture a character, a back story, a life. Sitting on my bed I would let these people live out their lives, their stories unfolding in my head like an old cine film.

I received my first camera when I was 12. A second hand Olympus Trip. It was love at first sight, and the beginning of a beautiful relationship that has lasted to this day. I documented everything. It was the reason I got my first job, a paper round, two days work would buy me one roll of film. I took it everywhere with me, a permanent fixture My mum would as if it was attached to me and dad would joke it would need to be surgically removed. I joined the photography club at school which brought me into the dark… room. What a place, it felt like the lair of an alchemist of ages past. The magic of mixing chemicals and seeing a blank page transform into an image before your eyes. The rendering of something from nothing, bringing people into existence, rescuing them from the white waste that is limbo. That truly is the power of a God and I wielded that power with all the sense of a normal teenager. Friends, family, pets, trees, birds, girls… Anything that caught my I captured and brought back to life in a frozen world.

Now we live in the digital age, everyone’s photos are stored on hard-drives and the cloud but I still have that shoe box at home and I bet you do too.